enables user to activate a link within a video or audio file
How do I activate a link in an audio file?
On a visible interface (video or GUI) I can think about something that I can activate by a sort of "point & click" interface. But on an audio stream?
Especially since audio is depending on time. Just think that you want to follow a link on the "bottom" of an audio file... should I wait until the link somehow passes by?
Or do I have to think of something interactive with sppech input like Computer: "This article was first posted on Slashdot..." Me: "Stop here and tell me more about that slashdot thing"
Where are all those AOL CDs when I actually WANT them?
Probably you've sent them to http://www.nomoreaolcds.com/.
BTW: If I read the article that says aCD Rom is a bomb ready to explode I really wonder if we can sue AOL for deploying weapons of mass destruction. *eg*
I don't think that you'll need an "anti-theft BIOS". At the moment I find enough security features inside the BIOS:
Simple password protection
Boot only when a special USB memory stick is plugged in
Access to system requires a Smartcard with a PIN (that's a feature of my employers PC products)
Harddisk password funcitions
I think the main problem with computer theft is not the loss of some more or less cheap piece of hardware. That can be replaced easily. The major damage is that you'll lose your data. But security measurs like the harddisk security features that are stored in a hard disks firmware make it very hard to get access to the data. Especially considering that a normal thief is not an IT expert.
If industrial espionage is concerned then your enemy has enough knowledge to do bad things when he has real phyical access to the machine. So a BIOS won't help much to keep an expert away from my data if I don't do additional measures.
What would be really helpful against data loss is a BIOS that goes on strike if I don't do backups of my data frequently... but that leads us to the problem that there is no easy way of backing up 80 Gigabytes on a 3.5 inch floppy...:-)
Would it be much harder for them to just go ahead and integrate a cheap GPS receiver into the laptop to find the physical location, instead of using the much more difficult tracerouting method?
Do you have a GPS receiver that works inside buildings? My (not so cheap)
Garmin GPS II has troubles already if I want to use it
in the forest.
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Well, if I have a look at the BSD license, then I can read the following: Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
And if I start FTP from a commandline I don't see any copyright notice. And I didn't find it also in the documentation that comes with Windows. So I wonder if MS is violating the BSD license. Or is the use of "strings" from a third party software the common way to show copyright statements?
From the interview with Chris Sontag: Certainly, as the evidence mounts, there could be concerns and issues for end customers.
Pardon me, but am I getting this one right? They want the end user to take liability for copyright violations, even when the end user is just using a product and doesn't even know about the internals of the product? And they are the same people that tell you that they take absolutely no liability if you suffer economical damage from bugs or security holes in their software!
Just imagine the time wasted by the discussion about this hoax. Well ok, we know that Microsoft is a source for viruses, but that they now also begun to spread out hoaxes is a bit new.
Re:X (and other Window systems) reduce productivit
on
Who Needs XFree86?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In my experience, firing up a windowing system
tends to reduce productivity. A simple text
based console app allows you to focus w/o
disractions.
Let's assume that you are right. But if a simple text based console can improve productivity, then what can a GUI (that means one background image and 12 Xterms) do to your productivity?
Well, the other side of the medal is that in our daily work we are usually forced to do more than one thing at the same time. And for that I really prefer to have some virtual terminals on my graphical desktop, so I can use the power of the text console and multiply that power by using it on several tasks simultaneously.
I'm waiting for the USA to ban Hamburgers, which originate from Hamburg (the 'ham' story is a myth!), Franfurters, Schnitzel, Mortadella, etc.
Exclude Mortadella please, that's originated in Italy and Mussolin^WBerlusconi showed very well that he's willing to support that war.
And don't forget, that the Statue of Liberty was also a present from France! Maybe they send it back to France soon since they are obviously abandoning liberty and freedom in their country.
Advocadus Diaboli (from Germany and very proud that at least we Germans have learned our lesson around 58 years ago)
I don't like those fancy feedback forms for some simple reasons:
They force me to fill out fields with things
like my name or address and that's something what my email-client or my signature would provide automatically.
There is usually no way to store what I wrote there in my email archives. But I like to file my outgoing messages.
They always want my mail address but they want to hide their own mail address.
"Due to genetic constraints, the final mammoth specimen will only be 88% pure mammoth and the process will take about 50 years."
50 years of pregnancy? Usually elephants have 2 years (if I'm not mistaking this). So no wonder that mamooths didn't have much kids and were wiped out from that planet.
I live in Germany. Also here the entertainment industry is very much concerned about illegal copies of their material.
So recently a sort of law passed that says that manufacturers have to pay 6 Euro for every CD writer they sell because there is the possibility that this device is used for illegal actions.
Practically that means, that I as the customer have to pay a penalty for not doing anything illegal. I'm not able to purchase a CD writer for my downloaded ISO images of a Linux distribution or for making backup copies without paying the penalty for illegal copying.
In acient history there was a motto "in dubio pro reo" that means that you can't put a penalty on somebody if you are not totally sure that he's guilty. Nowadays it looks like its enough that the entertainment industry complains a lot about illegal copies and that its not controllable what a man does with his CD writer and so they are enabled to charge every user for illegal copies without any evidence that he really does it. Its like they got permission to print their own money.
I wonder when its time to send the male part of the population to jail since they all are carrying the tool with them that could be used to rape somebody...
For me that means that I will get my 6 Euros back by NOT buying CDs any more. After around 1000 CDs the entertainment industry convinced me that I'm probably a bad guy and that they don't want to make any more business with me.
Well, I'm working at a big computer manufacturer in Europe. My firm also is not allowed by MS to sell a PC without an operating system.
The funny part is, that MS want's us to sell PCs with operating system and customers wants to get PCs without a preinstalled OS.
My firm is solving this thing by just adding a SuSE-Live-Eval CD to any PC that is delivered with an empty hard disk. So the customer is fine since he doesn't have to pay extra "MS taxes" and MS can't complain since we are shipping every PC with an operating system.
1. No best browser "Best" is a very individual definition. And I'm happy that with Linux I have a set of browsers that I can use. And if I ever encounter problems, then its usually not the problem of the browser but the problem of sites that doesn't validate to the HTML-DTD. I'm sorry, but its not correct to blame it on the browser if a web author is to stupid to apply true W3C standards.
2. Prompting for a file system scan I don't see a problem here. Usually the scan just means 1 minute more boot time and doesn't require human intervention. And I'm pretty sure that all is ok when the check is completed.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure Sorry. I have a somewhat "complex" print configuration using 2 printers (Laser & Deskjet) connected to a LAN printserver. And setting up that thing on Linux was quite more easy than doing it on Windows, especially after I had to change the IP address of the printserver.
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things The things are easy to do. Just RTFM and you know what. And I love that way because it forces me to focus on what I really wanted to do and doesn't distract me with thousands of funny wizards that try to make my life easier but instead make it more complicated. Did you ever got fooled by an automated spellchecker that changes what you are typing? Well, I'm happy that when I type no dumb programm thinks he can correct what I'm doing.
On the other hand there is no system that will be usable for an complete idiot without learning something. Oh... there are and the web is full of the things that those idiots produced because all is so easy to do:-)
5. Cleaner redraws Honestly, I never saw that problem in my life.
6. Die stray processes, die! This is wrong in Linux??? Did the author ever try to kill a not responding Explorer Window in Windows? Without getting his system unusable for a minute, killing the taskbar and so on? I'm sorry, but thanks to Linux I see what is running on my PC and I have the ability to kill things as I want.
7. Easy way of sharing files. What is "not easy" when using NFS?
8. Sound support. Works nice here under Linux. Ok, its a bit difficult to setup, but once you did it it works and it's not more complicated to use than sound under Windows. So don't bring up the "difficult configuration" here, since that is just a "run once" job. Oh, by the way... also Windows has some flaws in sound configuration, if you ever tried a VIA AC97 sound you will know what I mean.
on Linux will rock. 9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping." Sorry, I never thougth that "common" doesn't apply to Emacs:-)
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly. Well, I confess, I need only one resolution because it won't improve on a TFT display if you use something else than the resolution tht it was designed for (here 1024x768). But I remember that there is the option to define a lot of common resolutions (like 640x480, 800x600 and so on) in your XF86Config and then cycle between them by pressing some hotkeys. So if this is not "changing the resolution on the fly" I don't know...
Summary: I'm sorry, but this list looks like the author was desperatly trying to find flaws and he came out with a list of things that are really no problems for people that want to use the system.
One common mistake in testing is that people try to prove that the thing that they are testing is working. But that's not the goal that testing wants to achieve.
Testing is mainly done to find errors and bugs, so the test cases must be designed in a way to probe the limits of the system that you are testing. For example its not a proper test for a web server if it reacts to the request for http://foo.bar but it could be a nice test to send request with an URL that is terribly long and so we try to provoke a buffer overflow.
One other major mistake is that often the test is just "trying the thing out". A good test needs a good plan of WHAT you want to test, HOW you are going to perform the test and WHAT criterias are used to decide if a test fails or passes. Especially the last point is something that people want to "discuss away" by saying "Oh, that is just a minor issue, but the test at all passed" and so on.
And last but not least: To test something you also need a specification to know what the thing should do or shouldn't do. I've once been assigned to test a software that was completely without documentation and they told us to play around with it to find out what it does. That was really a nice base for a test setup...
Just the 2 cents from a guy that has worked long in software development and is now working in a PC hardware test lab.
I would have liked to read the article...
on
Data Quality Act
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
... but I only get a form that asks too much of personal data for my taste.
If you simply want a category breakdown, your credit card should already provide it - mine does.
Well, but there are still people on this planet who don't pay everything with a credit card.:-)
Simply put, the only way to reduce expenditures is to not buy things.
Ack. But often its not so easy. So a program that shows me where I spend most of my money - maybe simple things that sum up at the end of the month - can be very helpful.
Usually you can achieve saving by the following process:
sample data to know where your money goes (measure)
determine the major cost factors and think if you can reduce them (analyse)
implement a savings plan based on the data that you have
Well, I'm doing personal finance programs for many years, starting with MS Money, changing to Quicken and now I'm at Gnucash which fulfills my needs perfectly.
And it helped me a lot when I was building my house. I had so many money shifting between different accounts on the bank and so many bills to pay that I wouldn't have noticed that my bank was sending a money transfer to a wrong account. Simply $5000 disappeared on the source account and never arrived on the destination account. Without gnucash I guess that would have been lost in all the bills and account balances. With Gnucash it was a matter of a few minutes to find out that there is some amount of money disappearing. A short talk with the bank cleared the case and I got the money back.
After that experience I happily spend my 2 minutes every day to keep track of my money.
Yes BUT, the kernel would fail to recognize that it could support my particular card
Looks like you are a victim of a common problem that appears when PC manufacturers put things like
an Intel LAN chip on board. Here in my company (a big PC factory in Europe) I see this problems too from time to time.
The reason is that the LAN chip is practically the same that you will find on an Intel EEPRO100 but it identifies with a different vendor-ID, probably the vendor ID of the manufacturer that made your PC.
Since the drivers check if the hardware is "what they know" you will find out, that your special vendor ID (or even subvendor ID, device ID) won't fit for that. So check what PCI-IDs you see on your bus and then add the "unknown" ID to the driver. Just use the source Luke:-)
I've "fixed" a lot of problems like that, also
"not supported" new chips from Intel (like 82562) that is downward compatible with the supported 82559.
... I finally decided not to upgrade to SuSE 8.0 and so I'm actually having a very close look at Debian.
Well, SuSE is a nice distribution for beginners and you get things done with it, but recently there were some issues that I didn't like at all.
When upgrading my laboratory server from SuSE 7.0 to SuSE 7.2 I found out that there was no longer any support for Token Ring adapters included. So I had to go on the net and find the modules on my own.
Usually you should wait a couple of weeks before doing the upgrade and in this weeks you should frequently have a look at SuSE's support database to see what "features" were found.
Well, with SuSE 8.0 there is no doubt why here in Germany they are calling it "Windows from Nuremberg". Its just another collection of the latest software. Take a look at KDE 3.0, SuSE announced it when KDE 3.0 was still in beta status. Thinking of the production time of a lot of CDs I guess that the official distribution still contains a beta or maybe just a release candidtate. Well, maybe even the beta works fine.
But I want first of all a stable system before I try out new features. And I don't want to have a hell of a job after upgrading because several things don't work anymore.
So my choice is going towards Debian because this distribution seems to be quality driven instead of marketing driven.
Sony offers 90days limited warranty
I guess, that depends on where you buy
the PC. I'm living in Germany and here there is a law that the warranty period for products is 2 years. Maybe its different in other countries.
But besides the warranty time you should also have a very close look at the service costs. Here we had some reports in a PC magazine that especially for notebooks the firms charge you a "service fee" that is based on the calculation of their service costs. In the worst case this could mean that your notebook falls down the table, maybe the plastic of the "A" key gets broken and for the spare part (that has a production cost of 1 cent) you have to pay $800 due to the producers service prices.
What Microsoft is going to do is pretty serious. They are publishing documentation to the proprietary things they do and they publish them under a license that an Open Source developer is not allowed to use this information.
So in short they are denying you to use information. And of course that would just mean, that every Open Source development in projects that are related to what MS is "disclosing" have to stop immediately, otherwise MS could claim that the developers violated their license. And the question is if Open Source then has to prove if they are innocent or if MS has to prove that they are guilty. Anyway, legal affairs cost much more than many Open Source developers can afford.
So this is just another form of censorship. But its much worse. Microsoft is "publishing" something and in the same moment trying to disallow you to use that knowledge which is published. A thing that is really serious because the human brain doesn't have an infrastructure that tags information as "not usuable for Open Source" and so on. Or can you imagine a school that learns you how to add 1+1 and then tells you: You are not allowed to use this knowledge. And keep that in mind!
As a developer I don't want to bother if the knowledge that is stored in my brain is free or not! For me it is free and nobody, especially not Microsoft has the right to control what I'm doing with my brain!
So for an Open Source developer this sort of license agreement simply says: Read the information and forget it completely. And so there is no need to waste time with reading at all.
So, basically this license can be used by Microsoft to protect even things that are not able to get a patent for.
If I go on thinking about this a bit more, then I think that Orwell was a very big optimist when he wrote "1984".
Slashdot Mirror
How do I activate a link in an audio file?
On a visible interface (video or GUI) I can think about something that I can activate by a sort of "point & click" interface. But on an audio stream?
Especially since audio is depending on time. Just think that you want to follow a link on the "bottom" of an audio file... should I wait until the link somehow passes by?
Or do I have to think of something interactive with sppech input like
Computer: "This article was first posted on Slashdot..."
Me: "Stop here and tell me more about that slashdot thing"
Sounds a little bit like "Star Trek" to me.
The German magazine "Telepolis" (from Heise.de) has an interesting article about SARS in the USA.
Probably you've sent them to http://www.nomoreaolcds.com/.
BTW: If I read the article that says aCD Rom is a bomb ready to explode I really wonder if we can sue AOL for deploying weapons of mass destruction. *eg*
...that SQL-Slammer is going to be Open Source, does it?
I think the main problem with computer theft is not the loss of some more or less cheap piece of hardware. That can be replaced easily. The major damage is that you'll lose your data. But security measurs like the harddisk security features that are stored in a hard disks firmware make it very hard to get access to the data. Especially considering that a normal thief is not an IT expert.
If industrial espionage is concerned then your enemy has enough knowledge to do bad things when he has real phyical access to the machine. So a BIOS won't help much to keep an expert away from my data if I don't do additional measures.
What would be really helpful against data loss is a BIOS that goes on strike if I don't do backups of my data frequently... but that leads us to the problem that there is no easy way of backing up 80 Gigabytes on a 3.5 inch floppy...
Do you have a GPS receiver that works inside buildings? My (not so cheap) Garmin GPS II has troubles already if I want to use it in the forest.
Well, if I have a look at the BSD license, then I can read the following:
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
And if I start FTP from a commandline I don't see any copyright notice. And I didn't find it also in the documentation that comes with Windows. So I wonder if MS is violating the BSD license. Or is the use of "strings" from a third party software the common way to show copyright statements?
Pardon me, but am I getting this one right? They want the end user to take liability for copyright violations, even when the end user is just using a product and doesn't even know about the internals of the product? And they are the same people that tell you that they take absolutely no liability if you suffer economical damage from bugs or security holes in their software!
Just imagine the time wasted by the discussion about this hoax. Well ok, we know that Microsoft is a source for viruses, but that they now also begun to spread out hoaxes is a bit new.
Let's assume that you are right. But if a simple text based console can improve productivity, then what can a GUI (that means one background image and 12 Xterms) do to your productivity?
Well, the other side of the medal is that in our daily work we are usually forced to do more than one thing at the same time. And for that I really prefer to have some virtual terminals on my graphical desktop, so I can use the power of the text console and multiply that power by using it on several tasks simultaneously.
Exclude Mortadella please, that's originated in Italy and Mussolin^WBerlusconi showed very well that he's willing to support that war.
And don't forget, that the Statue of Liberty was also a present from France! Maybe they send it back to France soon since they are obviously abandoning liberty and freedom in their country.
Advocadus Diaboli
(from Germany and very proud that at least we Germans have learned our lesson around 58 years ago)
Who the f***ing hell was that idiot that wanted to buy the blue screens?
I would happily play around with XML Schema if only my Emacs/PSGML mode would accept a schema and treat it in the same way as it treats a DTD.
:-)
And sorry, I have neither the time to write my own Emacs mode nor the money to buy commercial XML tools.
Well, so I keep watching the tools and if they are Schema ready then so am I.
"Due to genetic constraints, the final mammoth specimen will only be 88% pure mammoth and the process will take about 50 years."
50 years of pregnancy? Usually elephants have 2 years (if I'm not mistaking this). So no wonder that mamooths didn't have much kids and were wiped out from that planet.
So recently a sort of law passed that says that manufacturers have to pay 6 Euro for every CD writer they sell because there is the possibility that this device is used for illegal actions.
Practically that means, that I as the customer have to pay a penalty for not doing anything illegal. I'm not able to purchase a CD writer for my downloaded ISO images of a Linux distribution or for making backup copies without paying the penalty for illegal copying.
In acient history there was a motto "in dubio pro reo" that means that you can't put a penalty on somebody if you are not totally sure that he's guilty. Nowadays it looks like its enough that the entertainment industry complains a lot about illegal copies and that its not controllable what a man does with his CD writer and so they are enabled to charge every user for illegal copies without any evidence that he really does it. Its like they got permission to print their own money.
I wonder when its time to send the male part of the population to jail since they all are carrying the tool with them that could be used to rape somebody...
For me that means that I will get my 6 Euros back by NOT buying CDs any more. After around 1000 CDs the entertainment industry convinced me that I'm probably a bad guy and that they don't want to make any more business with me.
The funny part is, that MS want's us to sell PCs with operating system and customers wants to get PCs without a preinstalled OS.
My firm is solving this thing by just adding a SuSE-Live-Eval CD to any PC that is delivered with an empty hard disk. So the customer is fine since he doesn't have to pay extra "MS taxes" and MS can't complain since we are shipping every PC with an operating system.
"Best" is a very individual definition. And I'm happy that with Linux I have a set of browsers that I can use. And if I ever encounter problems, then its usually not the problem of the browser but the problem of sites that doesn't validate to the HTML-DTD. I'm sorry, but its not correct to blame it on the browser if a web author is to stupid to apply true W3C standards.
2. Prompting for a file system scan
I don't see a problem here. Usually the scan just means 1 minute more boot time and doesn't require human intervention. And I'm pretty sure that all is ok when the check is completed.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure
Sorry. I have a somewhat "complex" print configuration using 2 printers (Laser & Deskjet) connected to a LAN printserver. And setting up that thing on Linux was quite more easy than doing it on Windows, especially after I had to change the IP address of the printserver.
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things
The things are easy to do. Just RTFM and you know what. And I love that way because it forces me to focus on what I really wanted to do and doesn't distract me with thousands of funny wizards that try to make my life easier but instead make it more complicated. Did you ever got fooled by an automated spellchecker that changes what you are typing? Well, I'm happy that when I type no dumb programm thinks he can correct what I'm doing.
On the other hand there is no system that will be usable for an complete idiot without learning something. Oh... there are and the web is full of the things that those idiots produced because all is so easy to do :-)
5. Cleaner redraws
Honestly, I never saw that problem in my life.
6. Die stray processes, die!
This is wrong in Linux??? Did the author ever try to kill a not responding Explorer Window in Windows? Without getting his system unusable for a minute, killing the taskbar and so on? I'm sorry, but thanks to Linux I see what is running on my PC and I have the ability to kill things as I want.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
What is "not easy" when using NFS?
8. Sound support.
Works nice here under Linux. Ok, its a bit difficult to setup, but once you did it it works and it's not more complicated to use than sound under Windows. So don't bring up the "difficult configuration" here, since that is just a "run once" job. Oh, by the way... also Windows has some flaws in sound configuration, if you ever tried a VIA AC97 sound you will know what I mean.
on Linux will rock. 9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping." :-)
Sorry, I never thougth that "common" doesn't apply to Emacs
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
Well, I confess, I need only one resolution because it won't improve on a TFT display if you use something else than the resolution tht it was designed for (here 1024x768). But I remember that there is the option to define a lot of common resolutions (like 640x480, 800x600 and so on) in your XF86Config and then cycle between them by pressing some hotkeys. So if this is not "changing the resolution on the fly" I don't know...
Summary:
I'm sorry, but this list looks like the author was desperatly trying to find flaws and he came out with a list of things that are really no problems for people that want to use the system.
Testing is mainly done to find errors and bugs, so the test cases must be designed in a way to probe the limits of the system that you are testing. For example its not a proper test for a web server if it reacts to the request for http://foo.bar but it could be a nice test to send request with an URL that is terribly long and so we try to provoke a buffer overflow.
One other major mistake is that often the test is just "trying the thing out". A good test needs a good plan of WHAT you want to test, HOW you are going to perform the test and WHAT criterias are used to decide if a test fails or passes. Especially the last point is something that people want to "discuss away" by saying "Oh, that is just a minor issue, but the test at all passed" and so on.
And last but not least: To test something you also need a specification to know what the thing should do or shouldn't do. I've once been assigned to test a software that was completely without documentation and they told us to play around with it to find out what it does. That was really a nice base for a test setup...
Just the 2 cents from a guy that has worked long in software development and is now working in a PC hardware test lab.
... but I only get a form that asks too much of personal data for my taste.
Well, but there are still people on this planet who don't pay everything with a credit card. :-)
Simply put, the only way to reduce expenditures is to not buy things.
Ack. But often its not so easy. So a program that shows me where I spend most of my money - maybe simple things that sum up at the end of the month - can be very helpful.
Usually you can achieve saving by the following process:
Well, I'm doing personal finance programs for many years, starting with MS Money, changing to Quicken and now I'm at Gnucash which fulfills my needs perfectly.
And it helped me a lot when I was building my house. I had so many money shifting between different accounts on the bank and so many bills to pay that I wouldn't have noticed that my bank was sending a money transfer to a wrong account. Simply $5000 disappeared on the source account and never arrived on the destination account. Without gnucash I guess that would have been lost in all the bills and account balances. With Gnucash it was a matter of a few minutes to find out that there is some amount of money disappearing. A short talk with the bank cleared the case and I got the money back.
After that experience I happily spend my 2 minutes every day to keep track of my money.
Looks like you are a victim of a common problem that appears when PC manufacturers put things like an Intel LAN chip on board. Here in my company (a big PC factory in Europe) I see this problems too from time to time.
The reason is that the LAN chip is practically the same that you will find on an Intel EEPRO100 but it identifies with a different vendor-ID, probably the vendor ID of the manufacturer that made your PC.
Since the drivers check if the hardware is "what they know" you will find out, that your special vendor ID (or even subvendor ID, device ID) won't fit for that. So check what PCI-IDs you see on your bus and then add the "unknown" ID to the driver. Just use the source Luke :-)
I've "fixed" a lot of problems like that, also "not supported" new chips from Intel (like 82562) that is downward compatible with the supported 82559.
Well, SuSE is a nice distribution for beginners and you get things done with it, but recently there were some issues that I didn't like at all.
When upgrading my laboratory server from SuSE 7.0 to SuSE 7.2 I found out that there was no longer any support for Token Ring adapters included. So I had to go on the net and find the modules on my own.
Usually you should wait a couple of weeks before doing the upgrade and in this weeks you should frequently have a look at SuSE's support database to see what "features" were found.
Well, with SuSE 8.0 there is no doubt why here in Germany they are calling it "Windows from Nuremberg". Its just another collection of the latest software. Take a look at KDE 3.0, SuSE announced it when KDE 3.0 was still in beta status. Thinking of the production time of a lot of CDs I guess that the official distribution still contains a beta or maybe just a release candidtate. Well, maybe even the beta works fine. But I want first of all a stable system before I try out new features. And I don't want to have a hell of a job after upgrading because several things don't work anymore.
So my choice is going towards Debian because this distribution seems to be quality driven instead of marketing driven.
But besides the warranty time you should also have a very close look at the service costs. Here we had some reports in a PC magazine that especially for notebooks the firms charge you a "service fee" that is based on the calculation of their service costs. In the worst case this could mean that your notebook falls down the table, maybe the plastic of the "A" key gets broken and for the spare part (that has a production cost of 1 cent) you have to pay $800 due to the producers service prices.
So in short they are denying you to use information. And of course that would just mean, that every Open Source development in projects that are related to what MS is "disclosing" have to stop immediately, otherwise MS could claim that the developers violated their license. And the question is if Open Source then has to prove if they are innocent or if MS has to prove that they are guilty. Anyway, legal affairs cost much more than many Open Source developers can afford.
So this is just another form of censorship. But its much worse. Microsoft is "publishing" something and in the same moment trying to disallow you to use that knowledge which is published. A thing that is really serious because the human brain doesn't have an infrastructure that tags information as "not usuable for Open Source" and so on. Or can you imagine a school that learns you how to add 1+1 and then tells you: You are not allowed to use this knowledge. And keep that in mind!
As a developer I don't want to bother if the knowledge that is stored in my brain is free or not! For me it is free and nobody, especially not Microsoft has the right to control what I'm doing with my brain!
So for an Open Source developer this sort of license agreement simply says: Read the information and forget it completely. And so there is no need to waste time with reading at all.
So, basically this license can be used by Microsoft to protect even things that are not able to get a patent for.
If I go on thinking about this a bit more, then I think that Orwell was a very big optimist when he wrote "1984".